1023 Added some code to customize my blog☕
☀️ I heard the boss won’t be coming to the office today either, so I’m going to spend this sunny day doing something I enjoy.
🖥️ I read the source code of the company’s recruitment webpage and thought I could write it myself next year.
🖥️ Spent my day until 14:00 making this demo page
😓 But, I didn’t make it all by myself; here is the original page and the source code.
🥤 Felt really tired and decided to have a break
☕ 15:10 Added an icon to my blog by adding this code into _includes/head.html
<link rel="icon" href="data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 100 100'><text y='.9em' font-size='90'>☕</text></svg>">
🖱️ 16:15 Added a line of code to make every link on my blog open in a new tab
<base target="_blank">
📖 16:20 Started reading Four Thousand Weeks Chapter 12 The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad
📖 16:55 Chapter 13 Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
📖 17:10 Chapter 14 The Human Disease
Notes:
The reason time feels like such a struggle is that we’re constantly attempting to master it – to lever ourselves into a position of dominance and control over our unfolding lives so that we might finally feel safe and secure, and no longer so vulnerable to events.
We don’t get or have time at all – that instead we are time. We’ll never get the upper hand in our relationship with the moments of our lives because we are nothing but those moments. To ‘master’ them would first entail getting outside of them, splitting off from them.
‘Time is the substance I am made of,’ writes Jorge Luis Borges.1 ‘Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.’ There’s no scrambling up to the safety of the riverbank when the river is you. And so insecurity and vulnerability are the default state – because in each of the moments that you inescapably are, anything could happen, from an urgent email that scuppers your plans for the morning to a bereavement that shakes your world to its foundations.
Five Questions
- Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.- Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
There is a sort of cruelty, Iddo Landau points out, in holding yourself to standards nobody could ever reach (and which many of us would never dream of demanding of other people). The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.- In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
This is a most unsettling discovery to those of us who have lived someone else’s life and eschewed our own: no one really cares except us.’ The attempt to attain security by justifying your existence, it turns out, was both futile and unnecessary all along. Futile because life will always feel uncertain and out of your control. And unnecessary because, in consequence, there’s no point in waiting to live until you’ve achieved validation from someone or something else. Peace of mind, and an exhilarating sense of freedom, comes not from achieving the validation but from yielding to the reality that it wouldn’t bring security if you got it.- In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
It’s easy to spend years treating your life as a dress rehearsal on the rationale that what you’re doing, for the time being, is acquiring the skills and experience that will permit you to assume authoritative control of things later on.- How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?
quietly do the next and most necessary thing
the ‘next and most necessary thing’ is all that any of us can ever aspire to do in any moment. And we must do it despite not having any objective way to be sure what the right course of action even is.
Fortunately, precisely because that’s all you can do, it’s also all that you ever have to do.
📘 17:35 Finished reading Chapter 13. There’s only the Afterword left now.